L’Arbre Blanc, Montpellier, France (Sou Fujimoto Architects)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Can a toilet become a garden, or vice versa? When does sculpture become architecture? How many outdoor decks can you cantilever off an apartment building before the building disappears? Can a forest in the sky become the 21st century's Eiffel Tower? What if you took out all the floors of a multistory glass residence and replaced them with movable platforms? What if you began a blog post with a series of rhetorical questions as a way of distilling one great architect's crazy vision?
Although he may not yet be a household name in the architecture world to the same degree that an older generation of Japanese architects like Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Arata Isozaki and now Kengo Kuma have become, as evidenced by his Monday lecture at the Portland Japanese Garden, as part of its 2019 Garden + Lecture Series, Sou Fujimoto seems to possesses similarly tremendous talent. But talent isn't quite the right word. Fujimoto is impressively curious—about materials, about systems, about how architecture can be one big Erector Set—but his true gift is a way of seeing.
Each of the projects from his past decade of work that Fujimoto discussed was utterly unique and yet part of an identifiable fingerprint. That's appropriate, because the architect seems to celebrate dualities: first of all indoor and outdoor space, but the natural and synthetic, intimate and wide-open, public and private, familiar and strange. Ultimately I come back to something Fujimoto said in the question-and-answer session following his talk. Asked to name his architectural influences, he said, "The first was le Corbusier in school, and Mies. I still love their works a lot. And many Japanese architects too. I also like Frank Gehry. The craziness is interesting." It's that last bit I think could be the title of a book about his autobiography: the craziness is interesting. And yet it's not an empty or pointless craziness. Like any designer, Fujimoto is still a problem-solver. All that craziness is in the name of creating functional, flexible architectural space.
Fujimoto at the Japanese Garden this week (Brian Libby)
Born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1971, Fujimoto graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1994. (Perhaps I'm biased because he's basically my age and graduating-class year.) He founded his own firm in 2000 and over the ensuing years became known for a series of eye-catching houses such as 2006's Final Wooden House, which stacked rudimentary large blocks of lumber to create a variety of interior scales and spaces, and 2008's N House, which placed a cube inside a cube inside a cube—the first two being room and architecture, respectively, and the third a kind of outdoor enclosure, but all three perforated with skylights.
Fujimoto's breakthrough project in terms of attention from the West, and the one he first discussed in Monday's lecture, was the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2013. Each year the Serpentine Gallery on the edge of Kensington Gardens commissions a renowned architect or artist to create a temporary summer pavilion on the grounds adjacent to the building. Since 2000, Serpentine projects have been created by a who's who of architecture: Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Oscar Niemeyer, Daniel Libeskind, Ai Weiwei and Herzog & De Meuron, and Bjarke Ingels.
Informally known as "Clouds," Fujimoto's pavilion did something subtly magical: it created a space that was wispy and undefinable like a cloud despite being made out of steel and nothing but right angles.
"We created a quite experimental structure, which is not just questioning the relationship between architecture and nature, but the definition of architecture," Fujimoto explained in Monday's lecture. "The structure is made by thin steel pipes, about two centimeters. It creates many cubes. All the structures are made by that module and many many steps. We have glass on the steps so people can walk up or sit down where they like. It’s kind of like giant furniture."
The point of the Serpentine project, the architect explained, was that "the boundaries between inside and outside become flexible." That's key in Fujimoto's work. "Sometimes the densities of the frame create more coverage, and in some places it’s more transparent to the sky. Everything is made by industrial materials, so it’s really artificial. But it’s also soft. Once you are inside, you can find more organically different places and interact with the structure. It is a place without any functions, but once you’re inside, you can find your own functions, through the interaction between your body and the space. It’s beyond the normal definition of function, but it is quite open and flexible. The transparencies and translucencies are changing according to where you stand and what you see. The whole structure is fixed, but as you yourself move around, the layering of the frames is always changing to you, and moving around dynamically, like a cloud. Boundaries between furniture and architecture are blurring, and between architecture and landscape. It doesn’t look like normal architecture, but once you’re inside, it’s really comfortable. It’s not enclosed space: protective enough, but quite open."
"It’s like a forest, in a sense, made with artificial things. Artificial and natural are always intersecting with each other. It helps us to re-understand the boundaries between architecture and nature and how we can go beyond that."
House NA, a Fujimoto-designed residence completed in 2011, is the ultimate in flexibility and challenges our most basic notions of a house. Instead of traditional rooms or floors, House NA is a multistory glass box with a series of movable platforms.
House NA (Iwan Baan)
"In Tokyo spaces are quite small. We talked with the client about how to create a rich, nice environment. A small house is just a small house. We tried to go opposite directions," Fujimoto explained. "We tried to achieve varieties and diversities of areas you can experience in a house, and divide the house into smaller plates and pieces that we layered at various heights."
The house's plates come in different sizes. The smallest plate is 2.5 by 2.5 meters. That means they're not always floors. "It’s almost like stacking furniture and tables," the architect adds. "Sometimes a plate looks like a floor, other times like tables or shelves. The function of each plate really depends on you: how you react, how you use it. All those plates are spread around to create space. You have 20 different areas to choose. If you have 10 friends, you can place each of them in one place and have a chat. It’s like you’re living in a small forest, like a monkey or bird, and stepping from one branch to the other branch. It’s made of steel, and the columns are quite thin. The impression is many small pieces. All of those pieces are creating a kind of perfected cozy, enclosed feeling. Even though the house is very transparent, you feel enclosed by the plates. It’s half open and half closed. I feel like this is a Chinese forest made by artificial materials. It’s trying to redefine the functions of your life. Saying one is a kitchen and one is an office: you can do that. But you can also change those relationships."
Then there was what's known as Toilet In Nature from 2012, a public restroom for Ichihara, Japan in a glass box, surrounded by a fenced garden — which is actually an experiment in delineating privacy and view.
"It’s funny, but it’s in a sense serious," the architect explained Monday. "The public toilet is an interesting program: how to deal with the relationship between public and private. It’s fundamental for any type of building."
Toilet In Nature (Iwan Baan)
Fujimoto's toilet makes one feel vulnerable because of the glass enclosure. Yet, as he explained, "Once you get inside this garden, you can lock the door. It’s really like your private space inside. The wall is tall enough to block views." The 200-square-meter garden essentially becomes part of the bathroom, or part of the toilet stall. "Once you’re inside, you can still enjoy the surroundings," he said. "It’s about architectural thinking: how to understand the boundaries. This black wall is blocking the view, but not the air. It’s quite like an open garden. The glass is blocking the air but it’s not blocking the view. We split. Normally, blocking the view and blocking the air are two functions together. But we tried to separate them. Is it possible to block the view and to enjoy the view? And to be very public but really private?"
After the project's completion, "this toilet got famous," Fujimoto told the audience with a smirk. "Many tourists take a big bus and come here to see this. They make a long cue." Which called for an ironic solution. "If you have so many buses, and so many people in line, you couldn’t get a toilet. People complained. Finally the city government put a portable toilet behind this wall. So it works. I believe in the long line history of architecture this is the first toilet next to a toilet."
The Musashino Art University Library in Tokyo, completed in 2010, is another conceptual idea carried to a compelling extreme: not just an idea of a continuous bookshelf comprising every wall of the building, but in so doing, enveloping the visitor.
Musashino Art University Museum & Library (Daici Ano)
"This is also about the boundaries between here and there," Fujimoto explained. "In a sense it’s quite simple. But there are many [wall] openings, and because of those openings you see many layers around you. You don’t see everything at once. It’s half-visible, half-invisible situations. Of course we have to create a functional library where people could find books. But I felt the fundamental function of the library could become like the way you walk around the forest: with no purpose, in a sense. And then you have encounters with books. It’s a forest of books without any physical green. We created such a layering of the bookshelves, of the spaces, that’s semi-transparent. You feel something happening behind the wall, behind the wall, behind the wall. It’s an invitation. You start to explore. You find other perspectives. It’s this endless series of inspirations happening. It’s almost like a labyrinth, wandering in a labyrinth."
One of Fujimoto's most eye-catching projects is set to open this spring: L’Arbre Blanc, or White Tree, an apartment complex in Montpellier France. Though it's a fairly simple building type—apartments with outdoor decks cantilevering outward—in Fujimoto's hands it becomes transformed. It's a building with walls you essentially can't see any of.
"Montpelier is really Mediterranean in climate. That’s why we proposed so many balconies. Even in the wintertime you can have lunch outside," Fujimoto said. "The shape is round, and we put balconies all around the building, so much so that it doesn’t look like a normal building. It looks more like a pine cone or a pineapple: an organic shape. In a sense, housing-block-and-balcony has been a really normal strategy for housing towers for a long time. We have many boring blocks and balconies. In a sense this is the same, but so different. Those dualities, of the normal and newness, that is the point. I like this point. It’s based on the normal. But at the same time, this normalness is reinvented."
"It’s amazing," the architect adds. "When you are standing at the bottom, you don’t see the walls. You only see the floating balconies. It’s quite big, but its’ also really light. It’s also interesting to see how…from the balconies, you see other balconies glowing below and above. It’s a new feeling of community, in a sense. Normally in your apartment and on your balcony, it’s really private. Here there are proper distances, but you can have connections with neighbors. It’s not completely divided. It’s a series of soft relationships, in the sky. That wasn’t completely intentional either. But I really like the effect."
Finally there's the Mille Arbres, or Million Trees, in Paris, designed in collaboration with Manal Rachdi OXO Architectes. It's part of a larger competition called Reinventing Paris that sought to transform a variety of under-utilized sites near Metro stations. "Our crazy idea was to make a floating forest in Paris," the architect said. "But this is a serious conversation. It’s trying to create harmony but nice contrast. The city of Paris is really controlled, but sometimes they do things like the Pompidou Center or the pyramid in front of the Louvre. It’s not just harmony but contrasting harmony."
Renderings of Milles Arbres, Paris (Manal Rachdi Oxo Architectes + Sou Fujimoto)
The essence of Milles Arbres is a building structurally sound enough to withstand a forest of mature trees on its rooftop. But the shape of the building is also uncommon—a sort of inverted pyramid with rounded forms—in order to also allow as many trees as possible on the ground surrounding the structure. "Because of this shape," Fujimoto said, "it really looks like a floating forest."
Fujimoto's work is compelling for how it blurs the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces, something that's also common in many Portland and Oregon buildings because of our mild climate. Yet there's obviously something more happening. In all these projects, the architecture seems to become less the kit of parts that we think of buildings having—the traditional base, middle and top of its exterior forms, or any number of different materials and mechanical or electrical systems on the inside—and more a kind of unified organism.
A friend of mine actually confessed recently that she used to dislike Fujimoto's architecture because it was gimicky. Is something like the Serpentine really architecture? And aren't all these projects a series of stunts? Perhaps there's a kernel of truth to that, if not more than a kernel. Yet Fujimoto's work causes me to think differently about architectural space and how materials work in unison. That's valuable.
When I look at the Serpentine Pavilion, certainly it is architecture, in that it's a built form that provides a degree of shelter or spaces in which one can move about. But it's also one material, and one system: one grid and one shape that gets repeated. One sees a version of that too in the Musashino Art University Library: by covering seemingly every last inch of wall space with bookshelves, what may begin as a practical move also allows the bookshelves to, aesthetically speaking, kind of take over the interior like some spreading organism: a kind of interior ivy rendered in wood boxes. It exists with House NA as well: those movable platforms may be about flexibility and providing a variety of scales and spaces within one small Tokyo building footprint, but it also liberates the essential building blocks of architecture—walls, floors—from their usual configurations and recruits them into a kind of larger organic system.
Fujimoto's buildings feel ideal for the emerging era of prefabrication in architecture. It's not to say he creates one design from which countless copies are made, but rather that he sees architecture as a kind of system, which he marries with an artist's aesthete's eye for elegant simplicity. Except for the library, it struck me that nearly everything Fujimoto designs seems to be white. That's not a new approach, and paint color alone can't really delight us. But that monochromatic approach is part of a larger idea of simplicity. Fujimoto's buildings feel very simple even when there is something very dynamic happening, something that makes his buildings look otherwise unique. It's like he's made invisible every aspect of the architecture that isn't dynamic and kinetic, and then opened his creations to the sun, air and sky.
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